Monday, September 26, 2005

Tillman was openly critical of the Iraq war, and urged his comrades to vote for John Kerry.

One of his fellow soldiers said:

“I can see it like a movie screen,” Baer said. “We were outside of (a city in southern Iraq) watching as bombs were dropping on the town. We were at an old air base, me, Kevin and Pat, we weren’t in the fight right then. We were talking. And Pat said, ‘You know, this war is so f— illegal.’ And we all said, ‘Yeah.’ That’s who he was. He totally was against Bush.”

And even more interesting:

He started keeping a journal at 16 and continued the practice on the battlefield, writing in it regularly. (His journal was lost immediately after his death.) Mary Tillman said a friend of Pat’s even arranged a private meeting with Chomsky, the antiwar author, to take place after his return from Afghanistan — a meeting prevented by his death. She said that although he supported the Afghan war, believing it justified by the Sept. 11 attacks, “Pat was very critical of the whole Iraq war.”

These facts about Tillman make his death much more heartbreaking. He was a conscientious, intelligent man who saw through the lies of Bush's war, and lost his life because of those lies.

One can only wonder what would have happened if he had lived, and returned to tell his truth.